America Aflame (12 page)

The Bible tells of Isaac and Ishmael, the one the offspring of Abraham and Sarah, the other of Abraham and a bondswoman. God looked upon Isaac as the future patriarch of His Chosen Nation. In order to secure that legacy, He banished Ishmael and his mother. For most Americans, the slave was an unworthy cause for which to risk the Union. To banish the slave from the political discourse, just as to banish the Indian and the Mexican from the land, was to preserve the Union. As a writer in the
Southern Literary Messenger
reasoned in January 1851, “Our nation is to enter Canaan as certainly as the Hebrew once did.… And shall any inferior nation stop us in our heaven-marked course?… Did the red men arrest us?… And who removed them from before our fathers, but the God who planted our fathers here?—the same God that has made us increase by the same manifest destiny by which he has made them wane and fade away. And shall the black man stop us? If one must yield, are we not right in saying—the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the free? Does not God by his providence say so too?” The writer concluded, “
The dissolution of our Union, for the sake of a handful of bondmen,
” would be a “wicked disregard of God's word.”
19

As it turned out, the slavery debate did not dissolve and the Union did. It would take a civil war to banish the slave and the slaveholder, and yet another war to banish the “red men.” Other Americans could not agree that a loving God would exorcise one of His children, even a black slave. It was not the slave, they believed, but slavery that blocked the road to Canaan. They argued that a Union with slavery was a thing not worth saving. The principles of the nation's founding and the destiny that God had designed for America stood in reproach to a Union without principle. The issue of slavery and the integrity of the Union could not be separated.

The problem was more than philosophical for Frederick Douglass. A former slave who had stolen his freedom a decade earlier, he had served the abolitionist cause as an effective orator and writer. After the compromise he feared for himself, his family, and his free black friends in the North who suddenly found themselves vulnerable to slave catchers. Three weeks after President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Law portion of the Compromise of 1850, an angry interracial gathering of five thousand in Boston's Faneuil Hall heard Douglass invoke the Revolutionary legacy and preach defiance of the law. “We one and all,—without the slightest hope of making successful resistance,—are resolved rather to die than to go back. If you are … prepared to see the streets of Boston flowing with innocent blood,… just give in … to the fugitive slave bill—you, who live on the street where the blood first spouted in defense of freedom.”
20

African Americans formed “leagues of freedom” to protect themselves and organize rescue from slave catchers if necessary. Some abandoned America altogether. More than three hundred African Americans from Pittsburgh resolved to migrate north of the border. Within ninety days of the law taking effect, more than three thousand free blacks left the northern states for Canada.

With the Fugitive Slave Law, the northern and southern extremes switched sides: the former now strong defenders of states' rights, particularly the right of a state to nullify federal laws, and the latter insisting on federal intervention. The reversed roles indicated that the debate centered on slavery, not on differing interpretations of the Constitution.

Several northern states—Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—had enacted personal liberty laws in the 1840s barring state officials from aiding in the arrest and detention of fugitive slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law voided these statutes, but lawmakers in several northern states called for either outright nullification or tacit nonenforcement of the federal law. Northerners, even those not particularly inclined toward anti-slavery politics, recoiled from the provision requiring them to actively participate in the capture, prosecution, and return of escaped slaves. Their involvement with slavery had heretofore been indirect: the clothes they wore, the profits they accumulated from the sale and manufacture of cotton, and the banks, railroads, and shipping companies that grew wealthy from the proceeds of human bondage and then shared those receipts with tens of thousands of workers and shareholders.

Few northerners thought about these connections. The Fugitive Slave Law, however, suddenly threw them into direct contact with one of the most unsavory aspects of the institution. It commanded citizens “to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required.” Anyone caught providing food and shelter to an escaped slave, assuming northern whites could discern who was a runaway, would be subject to a fine of one thousand dollars and six months in prison. The law also suspended habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury for captured blacks. Judges received a hundred dollars for every slave returned to his or her owner, providing a monetary incentive for jurists to rule in favor of the slave catchers.

Congress's law had nationalized slavery. No black person was safe on American soil. The old division of free state/slave state had vanished, and with it Douglass's faith in the power of American ideals. Invited to give the Fourth of July address at a meeting of the Rochester (New York) Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass declined. Instead, he gave his speech on July fifth because “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.… This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.”
21

How could Americans rectify this hypocrisy? Douglass despaired of conventional means—persuasion and politics. “It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” He put the situation in personal terms: “Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn!”

These scenes were no longer part of only a southern tableau. “By an act of the American Congress … slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason & Dixon's line has been obliterated;… and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States.”

The law exposed for Douglass the vast abyss between the nation's Christian and democratic ideals and the reality for African Americans. “You profess to believe ‘that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,' and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate … all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world … that you ‘hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, ‘is worse than that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,' a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.”

The Fugitive Slave Law radicalized Walt Whitman as well. He expressed his anger in “Blood-Money,” a poem that foreshadowed his groundbreaking compilation
Leaves of Grass
. In “Blood-Money” Whitman used the common evangelical technique of applying biblical parables to contemporary events, echoing in literary form William H. Seward's “higher law” speech:

Of olden time, when it came to pass

That the beautiful god, Jesus, should finish his work on earth,

Then went Judas, and sold the divine youth,

And took pay for his body.…

The cycles, with their long shadows, have stalk'd silently forward

Since those ancient days—many a pouch enwrapping meanwhile

Its fee, like that paid for the son of Mary.

And still goes one, saying,

“What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto you?”

And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver.
22

It would fall to Harriet Beecher Stowe, though she could not know it yet, deep in her grief over Charley, to take the ideals expressed in the oratory of Douglass and the poetry of Whitman, take their admonishments to people of faith, take their shame over the rank hypocrisy of their fellow Americans, and take their belief that God placed America on this earth to do great things, and transform these expressions into a language both universal and personal.

Harriet took her grief and her family to Brunswick, Maine. Her husband, Calvin, had received a teaching position at Bowdoin College. Although packing up and leaving Charley was not easy, Harriet looked forward to the more healthful environment of New England, her home.
23

Harriet set up a modest household for her family in Brunswick. She was well aware of her obligation to support her husband, take care of the children's moral upbringing, and create a comfortable home for her family. She was also aware of the growing feminist movement in the North, especially in the cities, where middle-class women enjoyed an array of consumer options, employment, and education. Some of those women were clamoring for the vote, wider educational opportunities, and property and marriage benefits on the same ground as men. Neither Harriet nor her sister Catharine, who was already making a name for herself as a promoter of women's education, was a feminist in the nineteenth-century sense of that word. They believed in separate though complementary roles for men and women and asserted that a woman's stewardship of her family's spiritual life exceeded any role men possessed in the larger society. The family and the home, woman's domain, were the foundations of that society. They did not support woman's suffrage, and they believed that a woman's place at home, what Harriet called the “site of perfect love on earth,” afforded her significant power in shaping the future generation, in bringing family members to Christ, and in using that moral capital to support an array of causes from prison reform to temperance to the abolition of slavery. From Harriet's perspective, that was fulfillment enough.
24

Harriet believed that even the most mundane household chores were worthy of a woman's attention. The domestic sphere, rather than being a confinement for women, held liberating possibilities: “even the small, frittering cares of women's life—the attention to buttons, trimmings, thread and sewing-silk—may be an expression of their patriotism and their religion.” She complained about modern middle-class city women who hired “operators [to] stretch and exercise their inactive muscles,” and extolled the women of bygone days who had “knowledge of all sorts of medicines, gargles, and alleviates … [and] perfect familiarity with every canon and law of good nursing.… To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.”
25

Harriet did not attend the historic meeting of women activists at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848; nor did she comment on its outcome. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leading organizer of the event, believed, contrary to Harriet and Catharine, that a woman's place in the home reflected her subordinate position in society and confined her to domestic duties that served “to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.” Stanton, like Frederick Douglass, appealed to the nation's origins, especially to the Declaration of Independence, which became the template for her “Declaration of Sentiments” presented at the Seneca Falls meeting. Frederick Douglass was one of the few males in attendance, and Stanton drew a direct parallel between women's dependence and that of the slave, a position neither Harriet nor her sister Catharine supported.
26

Anti-slavery remained Harriet's great interest. By 1850, she had not yet embraced politics as a means to attack the institution. She believed in the power of moral persuasion, of using evangelical Christianity to open minds and touch hearts. She believed in her literary gifts. She wanted to write again, to salve her grief and, not incidentally, to add to Calvin's meager professorial income. Writing was one of the few acceptable ways a married woman with children could earn extra money for the household.

Harriet was not a stranger to writing. She shared her father's passion for expository literature, though she wrote much more politely. In Cincinnati, her first publication was a geography textbook. A very practical endeavor for a nation in motion hither and yon; even more practical as her sister Catharine, following their father's admonition to train up young Protestants, had opened a school. The textbook would be just the thing to familiarize recently arrived children—and everyone in those days was a newcomer to Cincinnati—with the West.

The research for the book provided an education for Harriet as well. Locating Cincinnati at the center of things was not only a device to engage her sister's pupils, but it also seemed appropriate in other ways. Her father taught that curiosity was a good thing; that inquiry and freedom complemented each other. Cincinnati stood astride a great river that separated freedom from slavery, and, as a New England girl, she knew little of the latter. So she crossed the river and visited a plantation in Kentucky. To her evolving thought, this institution seemed a more immanent threat than the pope.